Thursday, July 14, 2005

Are blogs another way to publish content?

Folks,
The people from the blogging survey asked this question of me via e-mail. Read my answer below. I would love to see you all add to this answer with your thoughts and ideas.
thanks
farida



Question: Please rate your blog's impact on the following factors in your company.

Another way to publish content and ideas was the top answer to question eight in survey.

Do you think this answer means that companies did not have the place to publish certain ideas and content, or that a blog is just another place to publish the same type of content you might publish on your corporate website?

Answer: If I had to pick I would say the latter for sure. But the reason why organizations could use another publishing medium is in part due to saturation of existing media and in part due to a change in how we work. An analogy that best describes this is television. Product companies have realized that the effectiveness of their television advertising has dropped considerably. Are people watching less TV? I wish! The availability of on demand television through Tivo and DVRs have led to a drop in "commercials" watching. People record their shows and fast forward through the commercials. So product companies have had to think of other ways of getting the message out and an example of that which everyone recognizes is the partnership with TV shows like The Apprentice. Pontiac sold more cars and Burger King sold more burgers because the show used those products in their competitions.

On a similar note, how we work has changed. We are more collaborative now than ever before. We have access to more information, we have access to higher data speeds, we need more information these days to deal with the global environment than we did before. These changes are leading to the search for more effective means of communicating and blogs is one of them. Its low barrier to entry and ease of use makes it an easy tool for people to collaborate and share. In my opinion Web sites and Intranets are still effective mediums for sharing information but I think they are not getting the credit they deserve because people may been jaded from past experiences of sites that were either not populated with content or stale sites where content never changed.

Farida

3 comments:

Dave S said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Dave S said...

Farida,

I'm working on a project that provides a new mechanism for finding quality. The idea is that when there are a large number of people participating in a discussion, the amount of input is too great for a single person to digest. If one post contains a gem, it will presumably, over time, become popular enough to get everyone's attention. But this process can be greatly sped up.

The project attempts to speed up the process of finding quality input by asking participants to sort a set of several posts (the top-level posts under a given topic, or the replies to a given post, for example) into a list reflecting their quality. It combines the ranking input from a number of members to identify those posts that are recognized as having quality. Posts recognized as having less quality can then be skipped by readers who don't have time to read all input.

It seems like it might be interesting to someone in your line of work.

Anonymous said...

We've hacked together a couple of open source projects to set up an enterprise blogging system with secutiry, tagging, taxonomy, rss, workflow, etc. that can support 1000's of bloggers. The core system we use is already supporting the mozilla/firefox gig.

jim wilde
www.advancinginsights.com